Dr. Amy Orsborn, core scientist at Washington National Biomedical Research Center and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, has been named a 2026-2027 Fulbright Scholar. She’s one of eight UW faculty and staff selected for the honor this year. She’ll use her award to study at the Champalimaud Institute for Restorative Neurotechnology in Lisbon, Portugal.
For Orsborn, the award is as much about connection as it is about research. “It’s really an honor,” she said. “Even just in the process of applying for the Fulbright, I think I’ve learned more about it as an organization, and the history of it, and what it does.” She points to the Fulbright Foundation’s emphasis on science as a bridge between cultures, and the way the program frames its scholars as ambassadors. “I’m sort of representing the U.S. when I’m in Portugal and trying to build bridges between the two cultures.”
Orsborn’s expects to be in Portugal for about six months, arriving in February and returning sometime next summer. While there, she’ll collaborate with Dr. Juan Alvaro Gallego and Dr. John Krakauer on two connected projects.
With Gallego, whose work focuses on rodent models of motor learning, she hopes to dig into computational models of how populations of neurons learn, versus how individual neurons change on their own, questions she’s explored in her own lab.
With Krakauer, an expert on how the human motor system adapts after injury, she wants to explore whether the adaptive brain-computer interface algorithms her lab has built for healthy volunteers could someday help people recovering from stroke generate more activity in weakened muscles. “That’s sort of where I’m really excited to collaborate with John,” she said, “to think about how this would apply to people who have had stroke and use his expertise in motor learning to think about how the algorithms might need to take that into account.”
The work in Portugal won’t involve monkeys, but Orsborn says the WaNBRC’s non-human primate research is woven through both projects. The models she and Gallego build will need to be trained and tested against real neural data, and the long-timescale learning questions they will explore align strongly with Dr. Orsborn’s current work with nonhuman primates.
“There are kind of fundamental anatomical differences between a mouse and a monkey and a human in terms of how our motor systems are coordinated,” she said. The more a species relies on its hands for dexterous movement, she explains, the more that shows up in the wiring of its motor system.
The circulatory differences matter too: a stroke induced in a mouse model produces different patterns of damage than what is seen in primates. A non-human primate model, she said, is a genuinely useful part of that translational pipeline, one that could help ideas move more reliably from the lab bench toward the clinic.
The eventual payoff, if the pilot modeling and early human studies pan out, is a road toward clinical trials, and BCI-based therapies that adapt to a patient’s own recovering nervous system rather than relying entirely on a clinician’s judgment.
There is one question that has nothing to do with neuroscience at all. Orsborn and her partner have a seven-year-old Wheaten Terrier named Ike. It’s still unresolved whether Ike makes the trip. “Ike really likes to hike,” she said. “So, I feel like there’s a big appeal to the possibility of bringing him with us so that we can do some exploring with him.” Whether he ends up a European traveler or holds down the fort at home, is a decision that, unlike research, can wait for now.